Vincent Lance still has close ties to his hometown, but for now, he’s enjoying the chance to broaden his horizons and his job experience.

A mechanical insulator by training and trade, the 35-year-old Val Caron native had to look for another job due to an ongoing dispute with his union. Nothing suitable materialized on the home front, but he was able to find steady work in Stratford, a southwestern Ontario town with a booming manufacturing industry and a labour shortage, about a year and a half ago.

“I didn’t know what else to do and I couldn’t really find any good jobs around Sudbury, so I came out here kind of on a whim,” Lance explained.

So far, he said, the experience has been nothing but positive, and certainly varied.

“I have done a few different things, actually,” Lance said. “Most recently, I was at a roll-form mill, making corrugated steel siding and stuff like that. Before that, I was welding in an auto parts factory.

“It’s pretty cool. They actually get us to do all kinds of stuff that I never tried before.”

He hasn’t relocated to Stratford, however, at least not entirely. Lance is one of a growing group of so-called super-commuters, workers who are flown in to areas with surging economies from cities with relatively high unemployment, are given housing in the community, then fly back to visit friends and family and partake in Northern activities every few weeks.

“I come out here, I make more money, and they help me out with my rent, too, so it’s kind of beneficial,” Lance said. “Plus, it gets you out of Sudbury, lets you experience new places.

“At first, I was working six days a week, so I didn’t make it home that often, but if I needed a weekend or something, or even four or five days to go home to see my family and stuff, they were more than willing to make arrangements with the company for me, so I was able to go home and visit.”

“They” would be the staff at Blue Branch, a Hamilton-based company that specializes in super-commuting.

“We have been really fortunate, because we have been able to find opportunities for people who were kind of struggling to get some movement going,” said Todd Clyde, Blue Branch CEO. “It has worked out really well.”

Clyde happened to be in Stratford a couple of years ago, working on a software development project, when he heard through a friend about the town’s growing labour shortage.

Local economic development officials had done an excellent job bringing automotive companies to the area, to support the CAMI plant in nearby Ingersoll and the Toyota plant in Woodstock. While the location made sense, however, Woodstock and its population of around 35,000 people was unable to meet the labour demand on its own.

Clyde, who already had experience in helping oil and gas companies out west to find workers, saw an opportunity.

“We looked at what they were doing and it was what you see a lot of – trade shows, a lot of spending on marketing in the area, but because a lot of these surrounding areas were also increasing their manufacturing, all the people in the local area were pretty much working and in Stratford, you effectively have an unemployment rate under three per cent,” Clyde explained. “So we said, ‘OK, let’s reach out a little further and find places in Ontario with higher unemployment rates and see if we can attract individuals from those areas into Stratford by providing them with a way to get in, finding them housing and then a job.”

In 2017, he said, Blue Branch’s largest source of super-commuters was the Greater Sudbury area, with 80 to 100 people flying in to work skilled jobs in the auto industry.

“Since then, we have had people flying in from all over Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia.”

It’s costly, but still preferable to the alternative for many companies. Stratford’s Better Business Consortium released a report earlier this week that recommends super-commuting to other methods, such as relying solely on advertising to fill vacancies. One member of the consortium that funded the study reported spending more than $40,000 on advertising, with little success. Another placed a capital investment in another production line on hold, due to lack of available workers.

Now that they’ve worked out the intricacies of super-commuting, Clyde said, Blue Branch is looking to expand and apply its model in other areas of the province with labour shortages.

Lance certainly recommends the experience.

“Wholeheartedly,” he said. “You already have a job, a place to live and a chance to experience something different. It made a huge difference in my life, anyway.”